Author Topic: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters  (Read 198870 times)

Crafty_Dog

  • Administrator
  • Power User
  • *****
  • Posts: 69125
    • View Profile
Trump in Fulton County
Voters, not prosecutors, should select presidential nominees.
James Freeman
WSJ
Aug. 25, 2023 12:37 pm ET


One does not need to approve of Donald Trump’s behavior to be appalled at the prosecutorial abuses directed against him, nor to be concerned about destructive precedents being set in the partisan pursuit of a former president.

The Journal’s Cameron McWhirter, Jan Wolfe and Aruna Viswanatha reported on Thursday from Atlanta:

Former President Donald Trump surrendered at the Fulton County, Ga., jail to answer charges that he operated a criminal enterprise that sought to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral victory in the state.
It provided a striking moment in which, for the fourth time this year, Trump had to present himself to authorities to face criminal charges—and the first time he, or any former U.S. president, stood for a mug shot.
The Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky is a former commissioner of the Federal Election Commission and a former counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the U.S. Department of Justice. He argued recently:

The attack on the First Amendment and the very structure of the American legal system by the Star Chamber of Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis is a profound assault on our democratic republic and the rule of law... Willis is trying to criminalize free speech and have a chilling effect on anyone in the future who might dare to question the results of an election...
By naming as alleged co-conspirators the lawyers who were representing Trump and providing him with advice and counsel in the legal actions that were in the state and before legislators during public hearings and in private conversations, Willis is also attacking the fundamental way that our justice system works, in which lawyers are tasked with vigorously pursuing the interests of their clients.
Mr. von Spakovsky delved into some specific allegations against Mr. Trump:

In order to justify her fantasy, Willis lists a series of actions that occurred from Nov. 4, 2020, to Sept. 15, 2022, which were supposedly overt acts in furtherance of the conspiracy. But Willis lists incident after incident (what the indictment terms “Acts”) of perfectly legal actions that not only don’t violate any laws, but are fully protected under the First Amendment...
The first “illegal” act listed is Trump on Nov. 4, 2020, making a “nationally televised speech falsely declaring victory in the 2020 presidential election.” She makes similar ridiculous claims against other defendants, such as Giuliani, for example, because he “appeared at a press conference at the Republican National Committee Headquarters” making similar “false statements concerning fraud” in the 2020 election.
Willis even laughably lists as part of the unlawful conspiracy many public tweets by Trump, such as one on Dec. 3, 2020, and another on Dec. 30, urging the public to watch the live coverage of the Georgia legislature’s hearings on the 2020 election. Or another tweet on Dec. 30 thanking the Georgia legislature “for today’s revealing meeting!” that Trump said uncovered “Massive VOTER FRAUD.”
Under that bizarre notion, would the legislators who participated in those hearings, listened attentively, and considered the allegations that had been raised be unindicted co-conspirators? That is how nutty Willis’ claims are—claims that are a direct attack on political speech.
It’s never clear whether prosecutors targeting Mr. Trump are trying to rule him out of U.S. politics or trying to anger Republicans enough to nominate him again and give Joe Biden a fighting chance at re-election. In either case they need to get out of the way and let voters make free decisions.


Crafty_Dog

  • Administrator
  • Power User
  • *****
  • Posts: 69125
    • View Profile


objectivist1

  • Power User
  • ***
  • Posts: 1048
    • View Profile
"You have enemies?  Good.  That means that you have stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill.

ccp

  • Power User
  • ***
  • Posts: 18353
    • View Profile
Mark to be on 2 xper week
« Reply #1605 on: September 11, 2023, 05:59:56 AM »
Did you see Marks show last night?

He announced starting this Saturday he will be on 2 x per weekend with new shows.
Sat @ 8PM & Sun @ 8PM  :-D :-D :-D :-D

Crafty_Dog

  • Administrator
  • Power User
  • *****
  • Posts: 69125
    • View Profile
Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
« Reply #1606 on: September 11, 2023, 06:06:36 AM »
Did not see!


Crafty_Dog

  • Administrator
  • Power User
  • *****
  • Posts: 69125
    • View Profile
AMcC: Fani Willis's montrous Trump Case
« Reply #1608 on: September 16, 2023, 03:09:59 PM »
Fani Willis’s Monstrous Trump Case
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis speaks during a news conference at the Fulton County Government building in Atlanta, Ga., August 14, 2023.
Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis speaks during a news conference at the Fulton County Government building in Atlanta, Ga., August 14, 2023.(Joshua Lott/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Share
702 Comments

Listen
By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
September 16, 2023 6:30 AM
If Willis is to be believed, a person need not commit or agree to commit any statutory crime in order to be guilty of RICO conspiracy.
Oh, about those 161 “overt acts” in furtherance of a RICO conspiracy that Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis trumpeted in the first few dozen pages of her mammoth indictment of Donald Trump and 18 co-defendants. Never mind. Turns out, according to Willis, that those 161 acts don’t really define the sprawling conspiracy to — well, to do something. They just give you some flavor.

The prosecutor now says she need not prove any of them. That was Willis’s position in contesting the attempt by Trump’s co-defendant and former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to remove the prosecution to federal court. The district attorney insists that, instead of proving what she’s ramblingly pleaded in the first 60 pages of the indictment, she can just prove other acts, even if they’re not in the indictment. By the DA’s lights, whatever she decides to prove just needs to be somehow connected to what she frames as a conspiracy to reverse the result of the 2020 presidential election — notwithstanding that it is not a crime to try to reverse the result of an election.

So how are Trump, Meadows, and the other 17 defendants supposed to know what they are alleged to have done to make themselves guilty of racketeering? Well, what’s there to know? In Willis World, to be guilty, they don’t need to have done anything! According to the DA, as long as any defendant was “associated” with the group that is alleged to have conspired, that defendant is guilty — and is looking at a sentence of up to 20 years’ imprisonment, with a minimum of five years in the slammer.

That’s the prosecutor’s story. And I’m sure you’ll be shocked to learn that it was good enough for Judge Steve Jones, an Obama appointee to the U.S. district court in Atlanta. In a 49-page opinion issued September 8, Judge Jones rejected Meadows’s removal gambit.

TOP STORIES
The Biden We Were Told about Never Existed
Has NASA Found a Second Genesis?
All the President’s Tells: How to Spot a Biden Lie
Nebraska Woman Sues Doctors Who Removed Her Breasts as Part of Teen Gender Transition
NYC Residents Vent Frustration over Migrant Influx in Neighborhood: ‘No Consequences for Bad Behavior’
Dove Facing Boycott Calls Over Partnership with Controversial BLM Activist Promoting ‘Fat Liberation’
Yes, Jones conceded, the overt acts that Willis outlined against Meadows did happen within the context of his official duties as a high federal official. Generally, that’s the low bar a defendant must hurdle to warrant removal, a remedy intended to prevent state governments from obstructing federal officials. But at Willis’s urging, Jones decided that the overt acts that Willis took pains to plead (and proclaim to the media) are irrelevant, because they “only serve to tell a broader story” about the conspiracy charge.

What matters, the court rationalized, is the gist of what Meadows is accused of doing — which Judge Jones describes as conspiracy to “unlawfully change the outcome of the 2020 presidential election in favor of President Trump.” Putting aside the lack of evidence of unlawful conduct, Jones concluded that Meadows’s efforts were essentially political and thus outside the scope of a presidential chief of staff’s governmental duties (the ones the removal doctrine protects). The judge emphasized that he was finding only that Meadows had failed to show that the case should be removed to federal court, not rendering any opinion on the merits of Willis’s case.

More on
DONALD TRUMP
 
Special Counsel Requests ‘Narrowly Tailored’ Gag Order for Trump in 2020 Election-Interference Case
Vivek Ramaswamy’s Got Ambition to Spare
No, Inviting Trump onto a Sunday Show Does Not ‘Normalize Fascism’
We’ll have time to revisit the removal issue. Counsel for Meadows have already appealed to the Eleventh Circuit, and there are additional removal motions by other defendants who were federal officials at the relevant time, in particular, Trump and former Justice Department lawyer Jeffrey Clark.

For now, let’s stick with Willis’s ballyhooed RICO indictment.

The other big story regarding the Fulton County case at the end of last week was the publication of the final report by the investigative grand jury on whose work the indictment is based. What caused a stir was that, despite having indicted 19 people, including the former president of the United States, Willis must have disappointed her investigative grand jury. That panel recommended that she indict 39 Trump supporters, including Senator Lindsey Graham (the South Carolina Republican and Trump ally whom Willis had informed he was not even a subject of the investigation), as well as former Republican senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, and former Trump national-security adviser Michael Flynn. For good measure, the grand jury also suggested charging a passel of Trump campaign lawyers (yes, that would be in addition to the several attorneys Willis did indict).

While Willis did not charge Graham et al., it is important to understand that the grand jurors’ recommendations had to have been based on the instructions Willis gave them about the law covering racketeering and related crimes. There is no judge in the grand jury. There are no defense lawyers. The grand jury’s adviser on matters of law, including on the proof requirements in statutes defining the potential crimes under investigation, is the prosecutor.

As previously explained, I don’t believe Willis’s racketeering-conspiracy charge states a crime. A conspiracy is an agreement between two or more people to commit a crime — meaning a statutory offense. If the agreement is aimed at achieving a lawful objective, it is not a criminal conspiracy — period. If people who agree to a lawful objective commit crimes while pursuing that objective, then they are guilty of those crimes; that, however, does not transmogrify the lawful objective into a criminal conspiracy. Let’s say you and I agree to buy a house; finding ourselves without sufficient funds, we defraud a bank to try to get the money we need. That makes us guilty of bank fraud. We are not guilty of conspiracy to buy a house, because buying a house is not a crime.

Seeking the reversal of a presidential election is not a crime. Hence, agreeing to pursue that objective cannot be a criminal conspiracy. In fact, state law anticipates challenges to the outcome of presidential elections. So does federal law — see, e.g., Section 5(c) of presidential-election law, which provides that a state certification of electors could be “revised by any State or Federal judicial relief” prior to the meeting of the Electoral College.

Furthermore, the Constitution protects the right of citizens to petition the government, which obviously includes petitioning state legislatures and election officials. And as any Democrat who has pleaded with President Biden to cancel student debt could tell you, it is not a crime to petition the government to do something lawless. As Representative Jamie Raskin (D., Md.) could tell you, the Constitution even enables partisan-hack congressmen, in blatant violation of federal election law, to petition the vice president not to count state-certified electoral votes.

Willis, nevertheless, seeks to criminalize such constitutionally protected activity by framing it as the Georgia crime of solicitation to commit a felony. The notion is that these state legislators and election officials would not just have been flouting the civil law but would have been guilty of a criminal offense if they had taken official action to undo the election result — notwithstanding that those officials would have had immunity for even wrongheaded actions taken within their official duties.


ccp

  • Power User
  • ***
  • Posts: 18353
    • View Profile
Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
« Reply #1610 on: September 28, 2023, 09:49:43 AM »
https://nypost.com/2023/09/26/trump-committed-fraud-by-inflating-wealth-ny-judge/

I believe this is civil persecution so Trump cannot pardon himself.

We knew this was coming with Shysters always whispering on enemy media outlets "what about Jared taking money from the Saudis?"

Plus the investigation of the Saudi wealth fund is suspicious.

https://www.blumenthal.senate.gov/newsroom/press/release/the-senate-permanent-subcommittee-on-investigations-issues-subpoena-to-saudi-investment-fund

Is this used as leverage over the Saudis by the Democrats?
Is this to find some sort of dirt on Jared?

I suspect this is all politically motivated not regulatory motivated.

No faith in the integrity of the Dems in any fashion whether it be the politicians  media  donors etc.


Crafty_Dog

  • Administrator
  • Power User
  • *****
  • Posts: 69125
    • View Profile
Re: The Russian conspiracy, Comey, Mueller, Durham, Mar a Lago and related matters
« Reply #1611 on: September 28, 2023, 01:48:49 PM »
My understanding is that lenders ALWAYS do serious due diligence in RE deals.  As such, I suspect this to be yet more horseshit, but good God how tiring it is to be having to make this sort of case yet again.


ccp

  • Power User
  • ***
  • Posts: 18353
    • View Profile
Read he is being sued for invasion of privacy.

Amazing the endless legal tools high priced lawyers can pull out of their shyster bag to torture and intimidate their targets.
As long as this California lawyer Morris seems to be funding Abe Lowell to no end.
Reported it could cost $ 1 million per month (I believe it) to pay Abbe's fees.

I wonder who else is funding this?

Crafty_Dog

  • Administrator
  • Power User
  • *****
  • Posts: 69125
    • View Profile
Amy champerty issues in funding him?

DougMacG

  • Power User
  • ***
  • Posts: 18128
    • View Profile
"I wonder who else is funding this?"

  - Yes.  I was thinking of two related points.  With Biden lawyers, follow the money.  And with all the cases against Trump, one of the objectives beyond diverting his attention and put him in jail is to drain his resources.  Bidens OTOH (my take) won't have to pay a penny out of pocket if they keep following the the directives of the ruling cabal.



Crafty_Dog

  • Administrator
  • Power User
  • *****
  • Posts: 69125
    • View Profile



ccp

  • Power User
  • ***
  • Posts: 18353
    • View Profile
Gotcha ! Don Jr. !
« Reply #1620 on: November 13, 2023, 09:48:33 PM »
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-jr-just-uttered-word-223839127.html

shyster thinks one wrong word self incriminates the Trump empire.

me:

what a joke .

what a mockery of the law .


 :roll:



Crafty_Dog

  • Administrator
  • Power User
  • *****
  • Posts: 69125
    • View Profile
Trump can be sued civilly for J6
« Reply #1623 on: December 01, 2023, 10:30:37 AM »
WSJ

Trump Can Be Sued for Jan. 6 Incitement, Judges Rule
Former president sought to dismiss civil cases, saying his office gave him ‘absolute immunity’
By
Sadie Gurman
Follow
 and
Jan Wolfe
Follow
Dec. 1, 2023 11:55 am ET


WASHINGTON—Civil lawsuits seeking to hold Donald Trump accountable for the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol can move forward, a federal appeals-court panel ruled Friday, expressing skepticism toward the former president’s claims of “absolute immunity” from allegations that he incited violence that day.

The three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said while presidents can carry out their official duties without exposure to lawsuits, plaintiffs including Capitol Police officers had adequately established that Trump wasn’t acting in that capacity while campaigning for re-election.

“The Office of the Presidency as an institution is agnostic about who will occupy it next,” Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan wrote in the 67-page opinion. “And campaigning to gain that office is not an official act of the office.”

Trump can try to claim immunity again later, the opinion said, but not at this early stage of the proceedings.

“The President doesn’t spend every minute of every day exercising official responsibilities. And when he acts outside the functions of his office, he doesn’t continue to enjoy immunity from damages liability just because he happens to be the President,” the opinion said. “When he acts in an unofficial, private capacity, he is subject to civil suits like any private citizen.”

Srinivasan, who was appointed to the bench by former President Barack Obama, was joined on the panel by Circuit Judges Judith Rogers and Gregory Katsas. Rogers was appointed by former President Bill Clinton, while Katsas is a Trump appointee.

Katsas joined Srinivasan’s decision, but wrote a separate concurring opinion to clarify the limits of the majority decision. He wrote that the panel didn’t definitively rule on whether Trump was acting in an official capacity when he gave the Jan. 6 speech. Instead, the court held that the plaintiffs had met their burden to survive Trump’s motion to dismiss, Katsas wrote.

A spokesman for Trump called the decision “limited, narrow, and procedural.”

“The facts fully show that on January 6 President Trump was acting on behalf of the American people, carrying out his duties as President of the United States,” said the spokesman, Steven Cheung.

The ruling affirms a lower judge’s decision last year to dismiss Trump’s immunity claims in lawsuits brought by Capitol police officers and Democratic lawmakers.

Judge Amit Mehta ruled in that decision that the lawmakers and officers had plausibly alleged that Trump’s incendiary rhetoric during his speech at the Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021, galvanized his supporters to violently oppose the peaceful transfer of power. Those suits can now move forward.

The decision “brings us a crucial step closer to holding the former president accountable for the harm brought on members of Congress and on our democracy itself,” said Joe Sellers, an attorney for the plaintiffs.

Trump will likely appeal the decision, which marks a setback as he uses a similar argument in the federal criminal prosecution charging him with trying to overturn his 2020 election loss. Trump’s lawyers are seeking to have that case dismissed, arguing he is immune because the allegations involve actions he took when he was president. The trial is set for March.

Special counsel Jack Smith has urged the judge to reject Trump’s immunity claim. Prosecutors have closely tied Trump to the violence of Jan. 6, 2021, saying his efforts to overturn the election “culminated and converged” that day when he attempted to prevent the certification of President Biden’s victory.

Crafty_Dog

  • Administrator
  • Power User
  • *****
  • Posts: 69125
    • View Profile
WSJ: Jack Smith and SCOTUS
« Reply #1624 on: December 17, 2023, 03:34:15 AM »
Jack Smith and the Supreme Court
The special counsel tries to drag the Justices into his political timetable for the Jan. 6 trial of Donald Trump.
By The Editorial Board
Dec. 15, 2023 6:40 pm ET


Special counsel Jack Smith’s indictments of Donald Trump have made him a central actor in the 2024 election, and now he is dragging the Supreme Court into the political thicket. The Justices don’t have to dance to Mr. Smith’s timetable, nor to his view of presidential immunity.

The Justices this week agreed to consider Mr. Smith’s petition for expedited appeal of Mr. Trump’s claim that his post-election actions related to Jan. 6, 2021, are shielded by presidential immunity. Mr. Trump’s lawyers must file a response to the petition next week. Mr. Smith wants the Court to skip the normal appellate process through the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and rule promptly so the Jan. 6 trial can begin on March 4.

***
Federal trial Judge Tanya Chutkan ruled against Mr. Trump’s immunity claim, and the special counsel wants a trial and conviction before Election Day. March 4 is the day before the GOP Super Tuesday primaries, so voters may not know the trial verdict until after Mr. Trump has locked up the nomination.

If that trial date holds, Mr. Smith will have helped Mr. Trump win the nomination by spurring a GOP backlash against his charges. The prosecutor will then become a de facto campaign voice for the Democrats in the general election. This is one of the reasons that trying to disqualify Mr. Trump by prosecution was such a mistake.

Mr. Smith’s prosecution all but assured that the Supreme Court would eventually be hauled into the polarizing election politics, but the Court needn’t rush to judgment. There are important issues at stake for the law and presidential power in both the Jan. 6 and document-mishandling cases. (Trial on the latter is scheduled to begin in May.)

The special counsel argues that the Court heard the Watergate tapes case in expedited fashion, so it should do so again now. But in U.S. v. Nixon, Richard Nixon was resisting a subpoena. There is no such legal urgency here, only Mr. Smith’s desire to meet a political timetable. That is not the Supreme Court’s job, and it would be damaging for the Court’s credibility if it appears to be acting politically for or against either side.

The Court could decide to skip the D.C. Circuit and hear a direct appeal from the two parties. But it should then do so in the normal course of its business, with ample, unrushed time for briefs, friend-of-the-court briefs, and oral argument. The Court could still rule before its current term ends in June. That could mean a trial could begin in the summer, but the trial date is the province of the trial judge and the two parties, not the Supreme Court.

The press corps has ignored the presidential immunity claim from the start, but it isn’t frivolous. The relevant precedent is Nixon v. Fitzgerald, a 1982 civil case in which the Court ruled 5-4 that Nixon had “absolute Presidential immunity from damages liability for acts within the ‘outer perimeter’ of his official responsibility.”

The charges against Mr. Trump are criminal, so whether absolute immunity extends to crimes is one issue if the Court hears the case. The Justices will have to decide if Mr. Trump’s allegedly illegal acts fall within the “outer perimeter” of his power to see that election laws are faithfully executed. Some might, making them immune from prosecution, while others might not, so Mr. Smith’s case could continue. Whatever the Justices decide, it would be best for the country and the Court if its ruling is unanimous.

The implications of the case go beyond Mr. Trump’s political fate. In Nixon v. Fitzgerald, the Court recognized the unique pressures and duties of the Presidency. It also noted the risk that the lack of immunity for official acts would “subject the President to trial on virtually every allegation that an action was unlawful.” This would hamstring the Presidency.

On the other hand, no one thinks a President has immunity for criminal acts unrelated to his official duties. If he did, he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, to borrow a famous Trump locution, and get off. That’s why defining what falls under the “outer perimeter” will be crucial if the Court hears the appeal.

***
These legal complications mean that Mr. Smith’s path to conviction may not be as seamless as he hopes. As we warned Mr. Smith and Attorney General Merrick Garland, indicting Mr. Trump would thrust them into the middle of an election campaign. This would have unintentional and perhaps damaging consequences. The wiser decision would have been to lay out the facts of what the special counsel found and let the voters decide.

They chose to prosecute, and the damage has begun to unfold. Let’s hope the Supreme Court can fly above the partisanship, and minimize some of the harm.
« Last Edit: March 03, 2024, 06:52:23 AM by Crafty_Dog »


Crafty_Dog

  • Administrator
  • Power User
  • *****
  • Posts: 69125
    • View Profile
WT: Smith to use data from Trump's phone?
« Reply #1626 on: January 01, 2024, 04:14:14 AM »
Special counsel Jack Smith said he intends to use the data his investigators extracted from former President Donald Trump’s smartphone in his evidence. ASSOCIATED PRESS

INVESTIGATION

Smartphone data seizure by Smith sets ‘precedent’

Critics: Move crosses ‘red line’ for immunity

BY JEFF MORDOCK THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Special counsel Jack Smith disclosed in court filings that he retrieved data from former President Donald Trump’s smartphone, potentially crossing what critics call a “red line” for presidential immunity.

Mr. Smith revealed that his investigators extracted data from Mr. Trump’s smartphone and he intends to use the records as evidence in his prosecution of the former president for election interference.

Mike Davis, founder and president of the Article III Project, said the seizure of Mr. Trump’s cellphone data “crosses a red line” in terms of executive privilege and will have a chilling effect on future administrations.

“This sets a destructive precedent for the presidency, as it seriously undermines the president’s ability to get his constitutionally protected, confidential and candid advice from his advisers,” he said.

The issue of presidential immunity hangs over Mr. Smith’s prosecution of Mr. Trump for allegedly interfering in the 2020 election and inciting the Capitol riot.

Mr. Trump claims that presidential immunity shields him from criminal charges because the events took place while he was commander in chief. His motion to dismiss the charges due to presidential immunity was kicked to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, where it remains after the Supreme Court rejected Mr. Smith’s bid for the justices to fast-track a final decision.

If the election interference case proceeds to trial, Mr. Smith likely will try to show jurors the smartphone data revealing when Mr. Trump’s phone was “unlocked and the Twitter application was open” during the hours of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol.

Previous court rulings offer little insight into whether a president’s electronic communications can be privileged and, therefore, shielded from prosecutors, or if Mr. Smith opened the floodgates for access to that data.

In 1974, the Supreme Court ruled that President Nixon did not have immunity privileges to withhold audio tapes of conversations he recorded in the Oval Office. The court held that a president does not have executive privilege when it comes to immunity from subpoenas or other court actions.

That ruling suggested Mr. Smith’s seizure of Mr. Trump’s electronic data is legally sound.

However, the Supreme Court in 2018 concluded that warrantless search and seizure of cellphone records, which includes the locations of movements of the phone user, violate the Fourth Amendment.

The decision could give Mr. Trump an avenue to challenge the use of his phone data at trial.

“The phone records may add to the unease of some judges and justices over the fight over presidential immunities and privileges,” said Jonathan Turley, who teaches Constitutional Law at George Washington University.

“However, Smith has the Nixon case to cite for such demands in the investigation of possible criminal acts. What is clear is that the Court may be pushed into a major line-drawing decision over inherent presidential immunities,” he said.

Jamil Jaffer, former associate White House counsel to George W. Bush, said the use of presidential cellphone data “raises really hard, complex questions on an unprecedented set of facts.”

Other legal experts seemed to agree that Mr. Smith’s disclosure was bad news for Mr. Trump.

Harry Litman, a constitutional law professor at UCLA, said the revelation should have Mr. Trump’s legal team “totally freaked out.”

“Experts apparently can figure out through Twitter data not just what Trump tweeted and visited but his physical whereabouts and others who used his phone. Gulp!,” he wrote on X.

In court filings, Mr. Smith said a person identified as “Expert 3” extracted and processed data from the White House cellphones of Mr. Trump and someone identified as “Individual 1.”

Individual 1 is believed to be former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who served as Mr. Trump’s lawyer during the time. A spokesperson for Mr. Giuliani did not respond to a request for comment.

The filing also says that Expert 3 “reviewed and analyzed data on the defendant’s phone and on Individual 1’s phone, including analyzing images found on the phones and websites visited.”

Earlier last year, it was revealed that Mr. Smith’s team obtained location data and draft tweets from the president after a legal battle with Twitter, now known as X. The company attempted to block the prosecutor’s effort. The social media giant ultimately lost the court battle and handed over an extensive list of data related to Mr. Trump’s account, including all tweets “crafted, drafted, favorited/ liked or retweeted.”

ccp

  • Power User
  • ***
  • Posts: 18353
    • View Profile
If only we could investigate the "by the book" "squeaky clean" Prez we would prove what we all know. He is not as described.

yes I am talking about the great snake

who claimed he bought house in DC because his daughter had 1 to 2 more yrs of school there.

She has long graduated and 'oddly' ( :roll:) he still has house there.



ccp

  • Power User
  • ***
  • Posts: 18353
    • View Profile
Fani Willis divorcee
« Reply #1629 on: January 10, 2024, 06:54:59 AM »
checked her out on Wikipedia

and noticed she is divorced since '05
2 children
so at least she was not cheating:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fani_Willis

DougMacG

  • Power User
  • ***
  • Posts: 18128
    • View Profile
Re: Fani Willis divorcee
« Reply #1630 on: January 10, 2024, 09:15:58 AM »
checked her out on Wikipedia

and noticed she is divorced since '05
2 children
so at least she was not cheating:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fani_Willis

Cheating on the taxpayers, not on a husband.  If the story is true, she traveled extensively on the money she personally directed to him.

In another scenario, she could sleep and travel with the guy but not appoint him to this bogus position because of the CONFLICT OF INTEREST.

If not for double standards they would have no standards.


Crafty_Dog

  • Administrator
  • Power User
  • *****
  • Posts: 69125
    • View Profile
More on the deleted J6 files
« Reply #1632 on: January 24, 2024, 06:10:36 AM »
https://washingtontimes-dc.newsmemory.com/?token=7d75a59d9632d6d657a1365f14c7f38e_65b126a2_6d25b5f&selDate=20240124

Jan. 6 panel accused of deleting over 100 files before takeover

GOP lawmaker demands passwords to encrypted records

BY KERRY PICKET THE WASHINGTON TIMES

The now-defunct House Select Committee on Jan. 6 destroyed over 100 encrypted files from its 2021 investigation before Republicans took over the chamber, House investigators say.

Rep. Barry Loudermilk, the Georgia Republican leading the House Administration Committee’s oversight investigation, said his computer forensic investigators discovered 117 files deleted by the Jan. 6 committee.

He is demanding former leaders of the Jan. 6 committee hand over passwords to the encrypted files.

It’s the latest twist in a monthslong back-and-forth struggle between GOP investigators and the defunct Democratic-run committees’s former chairman, Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, about the whereabouts of video recordings of witness depositions, transcripts, and other missing records.

Mr. Loudermilk said there is ample evidence of missing records from the Jan. 6 committee investigation run by Mr. Thompson and Rep. Liz Cheney, the Republican Trump foe whom Wyoming voters rejected in the 2022 GOP primary.

“It’s obvious that they went to great lengths to prevent Americans from seeing certain documents produced in their investigation. It also appears that Bennie Thompson and Liz Cheney intended to obstruct our Subcommittee by failing to preserve critical information and videos as required by House rules,” Mr. Loudermilk said on Fox News.

In a letter to Mr. Thompson last week, Mr. Loudermilk said his computer forensic team was able to recover the 117 deleted digital records from hard drives archived by the Jan. 6 committee. One recovered file disclosed the identity of an individual whose testimony was not archived.

“Further, we found that most of the recovered files are passwordprotected, preventing us from determining what they contain,” Mr. Loudermilk wrote. “In order to access these files and ensure they are properly archived, I ask that you provide a list of passwords for all password-protected files created by the select committee.”

The panel said Mr. Thompson has not complied with the request.

Mr. Loudermilk questioned what else was missing.

“You sent specific transcribed interviews and depositions to the White House and Department of Homeland Security but did not archive them with the Clerk of the House,” Mr. Loudermilk wrote last week to Mr. Thompson. “You also claimed that you turned over 4 terabytes of digital files, but the hard drives archived by the select committee with the Clerk of the House contain less than 3 terabytes of data.”

Mr. Thompson acknowledged in July that the Jan. 6 committee did not archive all its records as required by House rules.

He also said in a Dec. 13 letter to Mr. Loudermilk’s panel that the Jan. 6 committee “transmitted its evidence of potential crimes to prosecutors who are investigating former President Trump.”

Mr. Loudermilk said the missing documents include records of information shared with the Department of Justice and Fulton County District Attorney, as alluded to in the Jan. 6 committee’s final report.

Mr. Thompson previously denied that the select committee’s investigative matter was destroyed.

The Washington Times asked Mr. Thompson in December if the Jan. 6 committee had destroyed documents or other material.

“I’m not aware of the destruction of any documents,” Mr. Thompson said. “I’m not aware of staff being instructed to destroy any documents.”

“The law requires us that whatever product that we use, we archive that and that’s what we did. Everything that we used as a committee product, we shared,” he said, indicating that only edited material displayed at public hearings was archived.

Mr. Thompson, in a letter responding to Mr. Loudermilk, said the accusations were “false” and that the Jan. 6 committee closely followed House rules for archiving records.

He called Mr. Loudermilk’s accusations nothing more than a “futile effort to amplify conspiracy theories and attack the credibility of the Select Committee and outside prosecutors.”

The Times previously pressed Mr. Thompson about what happened to the unedited video of the depositions that were not shown at the Select Committee hearings.

“I have no idea,” Mr. Thompson said. “We’re not required to keep certain materials.”

Mr. Loudermilk also wrote letters last week to White House counsel Richard A. Sauber and Department of Homeland Security counsel Jonathan Meyer requesting “unedited and unredacted transcripts” of White House and DHS testimony to the Jan. 6 committee.

In his letter to Mr. Meyer, Mr. Loudermilk wrote that he failed to respond to his Aug. 8 letter requesting that he return records sent to him by the Jan.6 Select Committee.

“Based on records in our possession and public reporting, we know that numerous Secret Service employees were interviewed who were either with former President Trump or in proximity to former President Trump on Jan. 6, 2021,” Mr. Loudermilk wrote.

“It is extremely concerning House Democrats did not archive the transcripts of these testimonies as required by House rules, but instead hid them from House Republicans by sending them to your office.”

He added, “If you continue to refuse to return these records, I will have no other choice than to take steps to compel you to return these records.




Body-by-Guinness

  • Power User
  • ***
  • Posts: 1763
    • View Profile
Re: Anonymous Leaks (Smith?) of secret Mar a Lago room.
« Reply #1636 on: February 03, 2024, 10:54:25 PM »
https://www.bizpacreview.com/2024/02/03/report-of-hidden-room-at-mar-a-lago-leaked-to-media-could-another-raid-be-coming-1433551/?utm_campaign=bizpac&utm_content=Newsletter&utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_source=Get%20Response&utm_term=EMAIL
Raw meat for True Believers and those that suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome. Hard to squeeze much noise out of a delayed trial, so toss a secret room into the echo chamber and let the memes and dark conclusions fly.

Crafty_Dog

  • Administrator
  • Power User
  • *****
  • Posts: 69125
    • View Profile
A reasoned assesment of the GA case
« Reply #1637 on: February 20, 2024, 09:14:02 AM »
Though I disagree with the take on the 2020 elections, the rest of this is a pretty good attempt at REPORTING on the GA case.

https://www.readtangle.com/fani-willis-testimony-trump-georgia-election/?ref=tangle-newsletter

Body-by-Guinness

  • Power User
  • ***
  • Posts: 1763
    • View Profile
IRS Contractor that Stole Trump's Tax Returns Stole 10,000+ More
« Reply #1638 on: February 23, 2024, 08:41:45 AM »
Couldn't find a relevant IRS thread and so am dropping this here. Scope of theft by contractor that stole & shared Trump's tax returns far broader than reported:

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2024/02/22/it-wasnt-just-trump-whose-tax-files-were-stolen-by-an-irs-contractor-n2635490?fbclid=IwAR3cdesJ82fk8uRRThil_cLGXHCf59u7mZ9zHt81Mno1inr-oEI6rL9i9i4

Body-by-Guinness

  • Power User
  • ***
  • Posts: 1763
    • View Profile
Russia Hoaxes & Their Explanations
« Reply #1639 on: February 26, 2024, 03:51:09 PM »
A thorough catalog of sundry Russia asshattery:

https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/fourteen-russian-hoaxes-and-what-explains-them/?fbclid=IwAR0JrxLklc0JcnaEwLiesElrOzO1YrTnvTwWd3FFLWLBcPeOSFYJA-IBv0E

One contains a link good for many a giggle:

https://amgreatness.com/2019/09/02/lawrence-odonnells-cross-dressing-goat-wrestling-helium-huffing-ways/

I’m old enough to remember when the leftmost of the left discounted Stalin and his the corpses he piled high, gulags, the abject misery of Russian citizens under communism, and so on. Now the leftmost of the left blame Russia’s nefarious schemes for darn near well every ill facing America today. Clearly mass graves are < ersatz conspiracies in some circles….


Body-by-Guinness

  • Power User
  • ***
  • Posts: 1763
    • View Profile
Isikoff’s Fani Kissing Backfires, Take 2
« Reply #1641 on: March 07, 2024, 02:57:16 PM »
Hell's Bells, once again were the shoe on the other foot the rending of garments and other histrionics would deafen; instead amoral nitwits are gilded and illegal acts glossed over. Note how poorly our dear Liz Cheney comes off here as well as her hope her J6 machinations would breathe life into her flagging political career, and perhaps even lead to a presidential bid. Yo Lizbo, how's that working out for you?

With Fani Willis repeatedly saying the entire investigation into Republicans was the result of an illegally recorded phone call, defendants might pursue legal recourse.

MOLLIE HEMINGWAY

Democrat Fani Willis’ legal troubles extend beyond recent revelations that she deceptively hired her otherwise under-qualified, secret, married lover to run the political prosecution of former President Donald Trump and other Republicans in Georgia. A new book from Mike Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman admits that a widely misunderstood phone call, on which Willis’ political prosecution rests, was illegally recorded. That means the entire prosecution could crumble with defendants having a new avenue to challenge Democrat lawfare.

Find Me the Votes: A Hard-Charging Georgia Prosecutor, a Rogue President, and the Plot to Steal an American Election is a fawning political biography of Willis. For context on the bias of the authors, Isikoff was an original Russia-collusion hoaxer, and his articles to that end were used to secure warrants for the FBI to spy on innocent Republican presidential campaign advisers such as Carter Page.

For years, the media and other Democrats have held up Willis as a brilliant and credible prosecutor of Republicans. The new book suffers from poor timing, with Willis and her lover accused of perjury, subornation of perjury, bribery, and kickbacks related to the prosecution. Willis could be removed from the prosecution as early as this week.

Willis’ Radical Roots

Nevertheless, the book shares interesting details about Willis’ father, John C. Floyd, and his radical past. Described as a “onetime radical activist” who considered the police to be the “enemy” and an “occupying army,” Floyd founded the Black Panther Political Party of Los Angeles and said of it, “Our political philosophy is black nationalism.” He took former Communist Party vice presidential nominee Angela Davis as a lover and lived with her prior to her being placed on the FBI’s Most Wanted list for purchasing the gun used to murder a Marin County, California judge.

Willis, who was raised by her father, worked for Beverly Hills attorney Howard Schmuckler before he was disbarred and also before he was imprisoned for running a fraudulent mortgage rescue company. She worked for another lawyer in Atlanta who was disbarred for tipping off a drug dealer to an impending DEA raid. At that firm, she represented a crack dealer who “turned out to be the male stripper at her bachelorette party” and worked with Keisha Lance Bottoms, a former Atlanta mayor and now a top domestic policy adviser to President Joe Biden.

Isikoff provides these details to help readers “understand how Willis became the kind of law-and-order DA who would unflinchingly take on Donald Trump.”

Willis ran on pledges to restore professionalism and sexual ethics to the Fulton County district attorney’s office and to begin to deal with a backlog of 11,000 unindicted homicides, assaults, shootings, and other crimes. Instead, the night before her official first day, word leaked of a recent phone call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. The phone call had been dishonestly portrayed by Trump opponents, and Willis hoped that Raffensperger had been in Fulton County for the call, so she could prosecute Trump based on that false understanding of the call.

When she showed up for her first day of work, according to the book, “‘I just remember sitting down and looking at the TV and thinking’ maybe he was in Fulton County, she recalled. Her county.”

A Political Activist in Georgia’s Election Office

However, the person who recorded the phone call wasn’t in Fulton County or even in Georgia. That’s a problem. Jordan Fuchs, a political activist who serves as Raffensperger’s chief of staff, was in Florida, where it is illegal to record a call without all parties to the call consenting to the recording. She neither asked for nor received consent to record.

Fuchs was one of the main sources for Isikoff and Klaidman’s book, they admit in their acknowledgments. While they reward her with effusive praise throughout, she comes off very poorly. For example, she offers a frankly unhinged conspiracy theory that President Trump was planning to lose the 2020 election as early as May of 2020 and was therefore floating a plan with Washington Post reporters to win the election in Georgia through the legislature. She describes how she “invented a new policy” to block public view of an election audit. She indicates such little knowledge of election laws and processes that she seems to think Georgia requires voters to use Social Security numbers to vote.

Fuchs is instead described as a “street-smart deputy” of Raffensperger who is obsessed with personal slights, political payback, and her hatred of Trump, his supporters, and his team. Her previous dabbling in the occult is contextualized, along with her shocking lack of knowledge of election law and processes — which brings us to the illegally taped phone call.

Illegal Phone Call Recording

“Unlike many of her fellow Republican consultants with whom she had worked, Fuchs had a friendly working relationship with members of the Fourth Estate,” Isikoff and Klaidman write before describing Fuchs’ regular leaks to The Washington Post, which conservatives despise for its left-wing propaganda, hoaxes such as the Russia-collusion lie, and smears of conservatives such as Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Fuchs first gave The Washington Post fabricated quotes they later had to retract about a phone call President Trump had with someone in the elections office. Though Fuchs was not busted for her lie until March 2021, months after the fabricated quotes were used to impeach President Trump, the authors of the book say the embarrassment of being found out taught her the importance of recording phone calls such as the early January 2021 phone call that forms the basis of Willis’ investigation. They do not explain how this lesson worked in terms of the space-time continuum.

In any case, Fuchs recorded a phone call between Trump, Raffensperger, and their associates. Fuchs ended the call by saying they should get off the phone and work to “preserve the relationship” between the two offices. Instead, she immediately leaked the phone call to The Washington Post, which published it hours later.

Covering up the Crime

This is where the authors of the book admit that the very recording of the call was a crime:

Fuchs has never talked publicly about her taping of the phone call; she learned, after the fact, that Florida where she was at the time is one of fifteen states that requires two-party consent for the taping of phone calls. A lawyer for Raffensperger’s office asked the January 6 committee not to call her as a witness for reasons the committee’s lawyers assumed were due to her potential legal exposure. The committee agreed. But when she was called before a Fulton County special grand jury convened by Fani Willis, she was granted immunity and confirmed the taping, according to three sources with direct knowledge of her testimony.

Republicans had long suspected Fuchs was the source of the audiotaped call and, further, that she had illegally recorded it in Florida. Fuchs had noted in a Facebook post that she was in Florida visiting family around the time of the call. The book describes the close working relationship and “secret collaboration” of the Liz Cheney-led Jan. 6 committee and Fani Willis’ prosecutorial team. Fuchs should have been a major part of the televised show trial Cheney put on, further convincing Republicans that Fuchs had illegally taped the call and Cheney was helping cover that up. (Incidentally, the book portrays Cheney as the real leader of the Jan. 6 committee, that she viewed it as a “platform for her to resuscitate her political career” and would “provide a springboard for a Cheney presidential run.”)

The authors go on to say Fuchs would attempt to escape prosecution for the call if a Florida official brought charges by claiming she taped and immediately leaked the call to The Washington Post for “law enforcement purposes.” The authors somewhat hilariously describe this claim as an “effective defense.”

Fruit of the Poisonous Tree

The problem for Fani Willis’ political prosecution is that the book convincingly shows the entire prosecution rests on a piece of evidence that everyone now knows was illegally obtained — never mind that the evidence has also been completely misinterpreted.

“And Fuchs did what was arguably the single gutsiest and most consequential act of the entire post-election battle,” the authors write. “Without telling Raffensperger or Meadows, she taped the call.”

“It was all the evidence Fani Willis needed to get started,” they write of the leaked recording, adding, “The recording was the single piece of damning evidence that had launched the investigation.”

With this evidence provided in the hagiography of Willis, those persecuted by her political prosecution could argue the entire investigation is corrupted by the “fruit of the poisonous tree” doctrine.

“Fruit of the poisonous trees is a doctrine that extends the exclusionary rule to make evidence inadmissible in court if it was derived from evidence that was illegally obtained,” according to Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute. “As the metaphor suggests, if the evidential ‘tree’ is tainted, so is its ‘fruit.’ The doctrine was established in 1920 by the decision in Silverthorne Lumber Co. v. United States, and the phrase ‘fruit of the poisonous tree’ was coined by Justice Frankfurter in his 1939 opinion in Nardone v. United States. The rule typically bars even testimonial evidence resulting from excludable evidence, such as a confession.”

With Fani Willis repeatedly saying the entire investigation into Republicans was the result of a phone call that was illegally recorded, defendants might pursue legal recourse. It’s the latest challenge for Willis, even if the political ally judge reviewing whether she can continue prosecuting Georgia Republicans rules in her favor.

Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is the Editor-in-Chief of The Federalist. She is Senior Journalism Fellow at Hillsdale College and a Fox News contributor. She is the co-author of Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court. She is the author of "Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections." Reach her at mzhemingway@thefederalist.com

https://thefederalist.com/2024/03/07/new-book-admits-fani-willis-get-trump-investigation-began-with-illegal-recording/